“I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from ... cigarettes.” This sentiment, expressed by Barack Obama in January and shared by millions, has once again been challenged — this time by an academic review of 20-years worth of research. The handiwork of Dr. Wayne Hall, a professor of addiction policy at King's College London and drug advisor for the World Health Organization, the review implicates cannabis in a whole host of health problems, but, in particular, in mental-health issues and addiction among habitual users — especially teenagers.

Here’s another follow-up to my article about Jim Hoft’s dishonest tactics in promoting his bogus claim that officer Darren Wilson suffered a fractured eye socket in a purported struggle with teenager Michael Brown. As I pointed out in the earlier piece, Hoft posted a stock image of a CT scan of a fractured eye socket, but apparently erased the words “UNIV OF IOWA” from his copy of the image. Well, thanks to LGF readers @franklinftw and @loveheylola, I can now remove the word “apparently” from that description, because we have proof that Hoft (or someone who works with him) did...

Imagine going to the dentist for a free regular checkup, and getting a free $25 gift card in return. It’s happening right here in Pennsylvania, and taxpayers are paying for all of it. Every year, Pennsylvania spends $20 billion to provide medical care to low-income and disabled residents. But one of the biggest problems the state has is getting people to use those medical services for preventative care. Now a new program designed to address that problem has some people outraged. "I am upset." Michelle Tonkin is seeing red thanks to a Walmart gift card, which she recently got in...

Of the many roles Pat Robertson has assumed over his five-decade-long career as an evangelical leader - including presidential candidate and provocative voice of the right wing - his newest guise may perhaps surprise his followers the most: marijuana legalization advocate. "I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol," Mr. Robertson said in an interview on Wednesday. "I've never used marijuana and I don't intend to, but it's just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn't succeeded."

At the directive of Gov. Paul LePage and the Commissioner of the Maine Dept. of Transportation all work on Gateway 1 will cease indefinitely, effective immediately. The suspension of work on the proposed interlocal coalition was announced in a letter sent to participating towns and individuals on March 1 from David Bernhardt, the Commissioner of the DOT.

For a century, archeologists have been looking for a gate through a wall built by the Vikings in northern Europe. This summer, it was found. Researchers now believe the extensive barrier was built to protect an important trading route.Their attacks out of nowhere in rapid longboats have led many to call Vikings the inventors of the Blitzkrieg. "Like wild hornets," reads an ancient description, the Vikings would plunder monasteries and entire cities from Ireland to Spain. The fact that the Vikings, who have since found their place as droll comic book characters, were also avid masons is slightly less well...

This song is, to me, what heaven will 'sound like'...beautiful song from Gateway Worship...America's leading praise and worship band, featuring Kari Jobe (although she does not sing lead on this song). Watch this on full screen and turn up the sound or plug in your head sets! Heaven's Song by Gateway Worship

TRENTON, NJ (AP) -- New Jersey's accelerating population loss is starting to have significant economic and fiscal consequences for the state [SNIP] The report found the state lost 231,565 people between 2002 and 2006, including 72,547 people last year. The latter was the fourth highest loss in the nation behind only California, Louisiana and New York. Meanwhile, North Carolina grew by 807,000 people over the four-year period, displacing New Jersey last year as the nation's 10th most populous state, the report stated. When lost income and sales taxes from the people who left New Jersey are considered, the population drain...

Gateway and Packard Bell is done deal By Drew Cullen 9 Oct 2007 04:29 Subject to regulators, workers etc. Gateway, the US PC maker that is to be bought by Acer, the Taiwanese PC maker, is to buy Packard Bell, the (once Israeli, then Japanese, now) French PC maker that was going to be bought by Lenovo, the Chinese PC maker, which (according to rumours) had outbid Acer, which also wanted to buy Packard Bell. Got that? Good. Gateway had already announced that it would exercise right of first refusal to buy Packard Bell: yesterday it said it had funding...

Under terms of the agreement announced Monday, Acer will purchase all of Gateway's outstanding shares for $1.90 per share. The deal has already been approved by the boards of directors at both companies and should be completed by the end of this year, subject to government approval, Acer said in a statement. Gateway's shares ended at $1.21 Friday on the New York Stock Exchange. "This is the biggest acquisition in Acer's 30 year history," said J.T. Wang, Acer's chairman, speaking at a news conference in Taipei. "After this acquisition, we are solidly number three in the global PC market," Wang...

REPORTS OF A LAPTOP exploding into flames have caused Toshiba to urge its customers to check their packages. Toshiba laid the blame for the flames, that on May 24th, engulfed the British laptop, on a Sony battery pack. Toshiba said it asked Sony to investigate the incident and the firm indeed found that the battery was at fault. It was identified as being on Toshiba's warning list, but had never been replaced. As you should be aware, laptop computers can explode at any second, especially if they have one of the ten million or so dodgy, Sony-built batteries glowing inside....

On December 19, 2002, a 42-year-old mother of two was abducted and forced by her assailants into a hideout near some railroad tracks in Queens, New York. She was brutally assaulted before being rescued by a New York Police Department canine unit. The NYPD arrested five aliens in connection with that assault. According to records that the Judiciary Committee has received from the INS, four of those aliens entered the United States illegally. Three of those four had extensive arrest histories in New York City. The fifth alien, a lawful permanent resident, also had a criminal history prior to the...

Ok, folks...yes, I am logged in, moose bites can be nasti, etc... I have a problem that's baffling me. My Gateway Pentium4 laptop (purchased in 2003) has decided that its monitor won't show up stuff anymore. If I hook up a regular monitor to it, I can see stuff just fine in the monitor (external) but otherwise I see nothing in the laptop's monitor. I tried going back to its WinXP "Last Best Known Config" or whatever it's called, and nothing. I even tried to make the screen brighter...nothing. Short of getting a new one (and no, I am not...

Excerpt - Demand for computers during the Thanksgiving weekend appeared to be strong, with both notebook and desktop models enjoying brisk sales driven by deep discounts. Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL) was a standout, with some analysts reporting long lines in its stores and strong demand, even though the Cupertino, Calif., computer maker wasn't selling systems on the cheap. Shoppers at big-box retailers lined up to get the deeply discounted computers, but once the specials were gone, consumers didn't linger or buy more expensive systems, said Richard Doherty, research director at Envisoneering, at market- research firm. He said the strategy of...

In a déjà vu for the Orange County computer industry, John Lap Shun Hui offered $450 million to buy the retail operations of Gateway Inc., the Irvine company that acquired Hui’s eMachines just 17 months ago. Gateway’s shares shot up above $2 or nearly 20 percent Wednesday, after the offer was publicly revealed. The offer is about $1.21 per share. Hui, who is one of Gateway’s largest shareholders, chastised the company in a letter dated Aug. 21 for failing to include him in addressing Gateway’s problems. He pointed to the changing computer landscape, Gateway’s slow reaction, low stock price and...

"The similarities are almost eerie. This year, readers gave us the lowdown on over 13,000 desktop PCs—enough data to rate eight of the country's leading brands. And the final tally looks an awful lot like last year's survey results," Cade Metz reports for PC Magazine on "The 19th Annual Reader Satisfaction Survey." Metz reports, "This year, you diehard PC Mag readers detailed your experiences with nearly 20,000 PCs (notebooks and desktops) and more than 6,500 printers (from mono lasers to color ink jet all-in-ones). And what you say about the leading manufacturers isn't always what we'd expect. No big...

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan, July 5, 2006 – The U.S. Agency for International Development has started a $16 million road project that extends from the center of Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley and will eventually connect the valley to southern markets in Charikar and Kabul. A construction crew from Turkish engineering firm Entes and local Afghans work on the embankment as a front-end loader smoothes a new surface for the Panjshir Valley road. The 47-kilometer U.S. Agency for International Development road project is scheduled for completion in December. Photo by Tech. Sgt. John Cumper, USAF (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available....

June 30, 2006 - A former Valley school administrator will likely be going to prison. Friday afternoon, a Fresno jury came back with a verdict in the trial of the administrators of a now defunct local charter school. They were accused of misusing taxpayer money. An Action News investigation revealed the Gateway Charter School operated with little oversight, sparking a probe by the State Department of Justice. There were three defendants in the case, and the jury treated them all differently. Two of the former Gateway administrators probably won't see any jail time at all, but jurors decided one woman...

FOB KALSU, Iraq (Army News Service, March 13, 2005) – Iraqis celebrated the reopening last week of the Musayib Bridge, located about 45 kilometers south of Baghdad, and officials said it will make traveling easier for residents of Babil province. The span, which runs over the Euphrates River in Iskandariyah, is the main thoroughfare for merchants, worshippers and families who travel north to Baghdad or south to Karbala. The bridge was destroyed one year ago by a terrorist car bomb. The reopening ceremony March 6 was attended by Salem Salh Mahdy, Babil province governor; Gen. Qais Kamza, Babil provincial police...

Excerpt - SAN FRANCISCO - Apple Computer moved up a notch to become the No.4 seller of personal computers in the United States in the second quarter as Macintosh sales soared by one-third, according to two reports. Lenovo, the Chinese company that owns the IBM personal computer brand, lost share. Apple won 4.5 percent of the market to trail Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Gateway, the market research company IDC said Monday in a report. IDC's rival Gartner put Apple's share at 4.3 percent. [snip]

Supposedly, we face a major tech-trash "crisis." Too many Americans, according to a handful of in Congress, use their old home computers and other outmoded electronics as giant paperweights, storing them in attics, garages, and basements and "taking up space in homes and businesses." The "inappropriate storage of these things is not an option," said Rep. Mike Thompson, California Democrat, at a recent press conference. In the face of this calamity, he and three colleagues announced a new "working group" to educate Congress, apparently in the dark on the dangers of so called "e-waste" stored in homes or buried in...

Inflection Point This Week Changed the World of High Tech Forever, Though Most of Us Still Don't Know It It's an expression made popular in Silicon Valley years ago by Andy Grove of Intel: "inflection point." It's that abrupt elbow in a graph of growth or decline when the new technology or paradigm truly kicks in, and suddenly there is no going back. From that moment, the new stuff takes off and the old stuff goes into rapid decline, whether it is a new standard of modem, a new video game, a new microprocessor family, or just a new...

Three officials from the closed GateWay Academy charter school system were arrested in connection with a state Department of Justice investigation into misuse of public funds and embezzlement. The arrests are the first in the case since the Department of Justice raided schools, administrative offices, associated banks and other sites Jan. 24, 2002. GateWay, based in Fresno, had a string of campuses up and down the state before it shut down. Problems at GateWay and other charter schools led to new state legislation holding charter schools more accountable in finances and academics. Arrested Tuesday were Khadijah Ghafur, the charter school...

Battlements Found at Egypt's Ancient East Gateway Wed Jun 30, 2004 01:52 PM ET CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) - An Egyptian archaeological team has uncovered battlements from Pharaonic times at the ancient eastern gateway to Egypt in the north of the Sinai Peninsula, the Culture Ministry said Wednesday. The find includes three fortifications built in the area of Tharu, an ancient city which stood on a branch of the Nile that has long since dried up, a ministry statement said. The battlements stand on the ancient Horus Road, a vital commercial and military artery from ancient Egypt to Asia. The discoveries,...

A Few of FR's Finest....Every Day Free Republic made its debut in September, 1996, and the forum was added in early 1997. Over 100,000 people have registered for posting privileges on Free Republic, and the forum is read daily by tens of thousands of concerned citizens and patriots from all around the country and the world. A Few of FR's Finest....Every Day was introduced on June 24, 2002. It's only a small room in JimRob's house where we can get to know one another a little better; salute and support our military and our leaders; pray for those in...

<p>POWAY, Calif. (AP) -- Troubled computer maker Gateway Inc. announced Thursday it will shutter all of its retail stores next week, eliminating 2,500 jobs.</p>
<p>The company, based in the San Diego suburb of Poway, said its 188 stores will close on April 9 and workers will be let go as the store operations wind down.</p>

The downsizing at beleaguered Gateway Inc. continues, but today's headlines regarding a new round of layoffs are in error, a company representative said today. "Bloomberg reported it erroneously as being something new," said spokesman Bob Sherbin. "There is really nothing new; it's part of the restructuring that we talked about in the third quarter." The reports from Bloomberg and other news services were based on comments by Gateway's Chief Financial Officer Roderick Sherwood during a presentation at the Morgan Stanley Semiconductor and Systems Conference yesterday. Sherwood said the Poway-based company had cut about 1,000 jobs so far this year and...

SAN DIEGO - Gateway Inc., hoping to reverse its sagging fortunes in the personal computer business, said Friday it would buy privately held eMachines Inc. in a deal valued at $235 million. The combined company would create the third-largest PC company in the U.S. market _ still far behind Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. _ and give Gateway a stronger presence in low-end computers. "We've always struggled at the low end of the PC business," said Rod Sherwood, Gateway's chief financial officer. The agreement came one day after Gateway posted its 12th loss in 13 quarters, a result of...

Using Marijuana May Not Raise the Risk of Using Harder Drugs Marijuana is widely regarded as a "gateway" drug, that is, one whose use results in an increased likelihood of using more serious drugs such as cocaine and heroin. This gateway effect is one of the principal reasons cited in defense of laws prohibiting the use or possession of marijuana. A recent analysis by RAND's Drug Policy Research Center (DPRC) suggests that data typically used to support a marijuana gateway effect can be explained as well by a different theory. The new research, by Andrew Morral, associate director of...

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- In an effort to boost sales during the holiday shopping period, Gateway Inc. is giving away free computers to customers who purchase one of the company's high-end machines. The two-for-one deal is one of several promotions the struggling Poway-based company is offering between now and Christmas to beef up business. The company is also offering free shipping and handling on select PC purchases and is selling its PCs intended for at-home use with 2,000 songs pre-installed. Earlier this month, CEO Ted Waitt said that if Gateway does not have several strong weeks of sales in December...

<p>Public school districts and state education officials are failing to monitor the academic success and financial health of California's charter schools, state Auditor Elaine Howle said in a report released Thursday.</p>
<p>The inch-thick report on the taxpayer-funded alternative schools also found that some public school districts may be collecting fees from charter schools they sponsor without using the money to hire and train staff members to conduct oversight.</p>

A small group of PC owners has quietly filed a class action lawsuit against Intel, Gateway, and Hewlett-Packard alleging the companies misled them into believing the Pentium 4 was a superior processor to Intel's own Pentium III and AMD's Athlon. The complaint--Neubauer et al v. Intel et al--was filed June 3 in the Third Judicial Circuit in Madison County, Illinois. The case is in limbo awaiting a ruling on whether it belongs in a state or federal jurisdiction, and has not yet achieved class action status. It came to light this week after a copy of the complaint was...

POWAY, Calif. -- Gateway Inc.'s second-quarter loss widened amid a 33% drop in sales. The personal-computer maker said late Thursday it had a net loss of $58.5 million, or 19 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $20.8 million, or six cents a share. Analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call had a mean estimate for a loss of 17 cents of a share. Sales fell to $1 billion from $1.5 billion, but were in line with a forecast the company gave in April. During the second quarter, which is traditionally weak for Gateway, the company sold 651,000...

<p>State and Fresno Unified leaders are determining what to do with publicly funded classroom furniture bought by GateWay Charter Academy, which recently lost its charter because of questionable debt and a list of violations. California Department of Education and Fresno Unified officials are discussing how the desks, chairs, shelves and other office supplies bought with taxpayer money by GateWay could be used and who should use it.</p>

Crashed computer boots local man into jailOwner takes out frustration with a sledgehammer By John Lee Post-Crescent staff writerGRAND CHUTE — Since January, Gary Wilke has felt more than a little frustrated with his daughter’s $2,600 computer. He took it back to the store he purchased it from — five times. There’s been a new hard drive installed, a four-hour home visit from a computer technician and problems such as no sound and the inability to “burn” CDs, said Wilke, N512 Sonny Court, Appleton. The computer still wouldn’t boot up when he got it home from the shop Friday....

<p>Gateway Inc. (GTW) Chairman Ted Waitt, who founded the personal computer maker on an Iowa farm, chose to take a 92 percent pay cut in fiscal 2001 and received no bonus for the second consecutive year.</p>
<p>But Gateway's annual shareholder proxy, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday, showed Waitt did receive options for 3 million Gateway shares.</p>

WASHINGTON--A proposed antitrust settlement with Microsoft would allow the software giant to continue to dictate how computer makers configure their machines, a former executive at Gateway told a federal judge on Thursday. Peter Ashkin told U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly that even though the settlement with the U.S. Justice Department "purports" to give PC makers more flexibility to feature rival software on their machines, it would do little, if anything, to change Microsoft's behavior. He was the fourth witness called by a group of nine states that are seeking tougher sanctions against Microsoft for violations of antitrust law. Ashkin, who...